


with my head and with my heart

by celeste9



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-29
Updated: 2015-03-29
Packaged: 2018-03-20 05:36:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3638712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celeste9/pseuds/celeste9
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Bellamy asks Clarke where she is going to go, she honestly doesn't know the answer. She only knows where she can't go. (post season 2)</p>
            </blockquote>





	with my head and with my heart

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sure the writers have something crazy planned but I really just wanted Clarke to have some time to breathe, so this is her getting that, even if it's only in fic. Fills 'loss of home/shelter' on my h/c bingo card.

When Bellamy asks Clarke where she is going to go, she honestly doesn’t know the answer. She only knows where she can’t go.

After she leaves him ( _may we meet again, please, yes, please_ ), she simply puts one foot in front of the other. That’s all she can do.

Clarke finds herself in front of the drop ship.

She stands outside of it and stares at the doors. This is where it all began. She remembers how full of hope she had been. Fear, too, yes, but hope. Hope that the ground would prove to be the refuge they had all dreamed of, hope that they could build a home here.

How quickly that hope had turned to something else.

The graves are still there, untouched. Clarke drops down onto the ground so heavily she practically falls to the earth, as if her legs decided to give out at the first hint of a respite. She folds her legs beneath her and gazes at the mounds of dirt surrounding her.

Her friends, her allies, her companions. Her people. People who had put their trust in her. How many of them would still be alive if she had only been _better_?

( _find me a better way, she had begged, but no one could_ )

How many graves would there need to be to accommodate all the corpses Clarke is responsible for? The Grounders killed when she let Raven make a bomb and when she ordered the drop ship doors closed, the innocent lives from Tondc, the guilty and innocent both from Mount Weather. If they were all laid out, would you even be able to see the ground? Would the bodies stretch farther than Clarke could see?

She thinks the answer to the latter must be yes.

She remembers the look on her mother’s face when she had learned about the missile, that Clarke had known about it and let it happen anyway. Clarke knows that she will never forget the disgust, the disappointment on her mother’s face, and how that made her feel. All Clarke ever wanted was to be the sort of person her parents could be proud of but now she thinks of her mother’s face and wonders if she can ever be proud of Clarke again.

Maybe it’s a good thing that her father died before he could see what Clarke has become.

That night Clarke sleeps in the dirt by the graves of her friends. In the morning she moves on.

The only purpose the drop ship serves now is to remind her of the terrible things she has done. Clarke needs no reminder.

Clarke acknowledges that her departure from Camp Jaha may have been a bit abrupt. This would be easier with proper supplies, but she makes do with what she was carrying. If she had gone inside, she isn’t sure she ever would have made it out.

The ground is hard and the nights are chilly, but this isn’t the first time she’s faced such discomfort. Even in Camp Jaha she would be only slightly better off. She hunts for food. She isn’t the best hunter and she certainly isn’t as stealthy as the Grounders, but she catches enough to survive. She makes a small fire each night and knows it gives away her location but if someone wants to find her, well. She isn’t going to be able to stop them.

Sometimes Clarke thinks she can sense the Grounders watching her. They know these woods too well and they are too quiet, too good at not being seen, for Clarke to know for certain, but she thinks they’re there.

She wonders if Lexa has sent them to watch her.

When Clarke thinks of Lexa, she thinks of loss. She thinks of what might have been, between them, between their people. She thinks of what could have happened at Mount Weather if they had done it together, the way they had planned.

She doesn’t blame Lexa. She wants to, but she can’t. She tries to imagine herself in Lexa’s position, offered the opportunity to save all of her people with no blood spilled, at the cost of nothing more than a fragile alliance, at the cost of friendship and trust ( _and me, at the cost of us_ ) but not the lives of her own. Clarke likes to believe that she would never have said yes, that she could never have betrayed a friend, not for anything ( _except she has, she has, she betrayed Octavia when she left her to die in Tondc, and she betrayed Bellamy with that same act_ ).

But Clarke thinks of what she’s done and knows there isn’t anything she can be certain she would never do, not anymore.

No, she doesn’t blame Lexa. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.

One day, she hopes, she will see Lexa again. When the pain isn’t so fresh, when the memory of standing there in front of the mountain, alone, afraid, isn’t so sharp. One day Clarke hopes she can look at Lexa and not have it hurt so much.

Maybe then she will have learned how to think with her head and not her heart, because she knows the choices she made in Mount Weather were always, always made with her heart.

( _can’t it be both?_ )

Clarke sleeps little because when she does, she is haunted by nightmares. She dreams that she is twisting the knife in Finn, that he is looking at her with betrayal in his eyes. _Clarke,_ he says. _How could you? Clarke, I loved you. How could you do this to me? Clarke!_

Another night she dreams that she is the one tied up and that Finn comes to her. She can see the flash of the knife in his hand and Clarke begs him, _please, please, I deserve this,_ _I deserve it, please kill me._ But Finn only smiles at her and then he says, _but Clarke, I love you,_ and stands aside. Clarke screams when the whip cuts into her, and the person wielding it is Lexa.

She dreams that she is holding a gun, that she is directing a spray of bullets out into a crowd of faces she knows. As they fall they all cry out in fear and pain, looking at her accusingly. Wells, Finn, Maya. Raven, Octavia, Bellamy. Lexa. The last face belongs to her mother.

She dreams that she’s dying, that she’s killing, that’s she lost, that she’s alone, that she’s a stranger even to herself, and every time she wakes up she wants to never fall asleep again.

Perhaps the nightmares are her mind’s way of punishing herself. Clarke believes she should be punished. She believes there should be consequences for what she’s done, for the lives she’s taken, and maybe this is the beginning of that road.

( _it is only the beginning – the end would be… to end it would be giving up and maybe that is the one thing she knows she would never do_ )

It’s always quiet now. Clarke will hear a bird chirping or a rodent scurrying through the underbrush but it’s mostly just quiet. Too quiet. She misses her friends. If they are still her friends, because she can’t be sure. Monty and Bellamy, yeah, because in the end they were all a part of what happened at Mount Weather ( _together_ ). Raven, maybe. Clarke thinks that Raven would understand. She hopes that Raven would understand. She hopes that if Raven could forgive her for Finn then she can forgive her for this, and she hopes that it means something that Raven kept helping her even though she knew Clarke could have saved everyone in Tondc but didn’t.

Jasper will blame her for Maya. He certainly has the right - Clarke knew exactly what she was doing when she pulled that lever. As for Nathan and Harper and the rest of her people in Mount Weather, Clarke can only hope for their understanding that this was the only way she could see forward, the only way to save them.

Then there is Octavia. Clarke has mostly resigned herself to the loss of Octavia’s respect and friendship for good, which hurts more than she likes to think about. What happened in Mount Weather will surely only further prove to Octavia that Clarke isn’t a good person. She wonders whether Octavia will forgive her brother for it. Probably, even if it might not be immediately. Clarke can’t imagine a world in which the Blakes remain estranged.

Bellamy. Does Bellamy realize what Clarke did? Does he know that she left Octavia to die in Tondc? Could he still care about her if he did know?

It’s odd that what Bellamy thinks seems important now, and that the thought of losing him as a friend ( _they are friends, aren’t they?_ ) fills Clarke with dread. She doesn’t know what she would do if Bellamy hated her. Sometimes Bellamy feels like the only person who understands, who understands her, who understands what she’s done and why, who understands everything. Maybe because his own history is littered with as many questionable choices as her own is.

Some of those questionable choices they share. Knowing that someone else shares the blame for at least some of the blood on her hands doesn’t make her feel any less guilty, but it does help a little bit anyway.

Bellamy offered her forgiveness, as Clarke had done for him. She still doesn’t feel any better, even if she appreciates the sentiment behind the offer. Bellamy isn’t the person she wronged. She wonders if her own empty words had done anything for him. She hopes they did, she hopes that the mere act of her saying them had been worth something.

Clarke smells the smoke before she sees it. Someone’s built a campfire. It doesn’t take long for her to find the column of smoke rising up through the trees, and it will take only a short while more for her to reach it. It feels like a beacon calling her to it and perhaps that’s what it is. Someone looking for her.

Clarke knows better than to rush in to anything but she also knows that anyone living in these woods knows exactly what setting up a fire will do. It will draw everyone towards you. Whoever’s there either doesn’t care about being found, or wants to be found.

The question is, does Clarke want to find them?

Clarke knows she has nothing to fear from Grounders who aren’t hiding, Grounders who are all but setting out a welcome mat, and she knows that she is still under Lexa’s protection.

( _could it be Lexa herself? does she want it to be?_ )

Would Clarke’s people try to find her? Is she ready to see them? She thinks… she thinks… When she thinks of her people, she still thinks of what she’s done. She still feels Finn slump against her, dead, and she still hears Octavia deriding her. She still sees her mother’s face by the wreckage of Tondc. Maybe she always will.

Yet… And yet… She misses them. How long has she been out here alone, with nothing but her own thoughts? What would she give to see Raven quirking a smile at her, to hear Monty laughing, to be held by her mother? To see Bellamy?

( _may we meet again_ )

When Clarke left Camp Jaha, she did it in an attempt to save what was left of her sanity. It was selfish because it was for her, only for her, thinking of her farewells even as her mother had to be carried in. Clarke feels like she hasn’t stopped since she first arrived on the ground, like she hasn’t taken a breath, like the only thing keeping her going was thinking of what could she do for her people, how could she keep them alive, how could she protect them, how could she save them.

So maybe she deserves a moment of selfishness.

All moments must end, though. Selfishness, Clarke knows, will not sustain her. Selfishness doesn’t give her a reason to continue putting one foot in front of the other. Selfishness will not keep her going, not forever, because she has always found it easier to fight for someone who is not herself.

Clarke is curious about who she will find by the fire. She is curious about what will come if she allows herself to see.

She doesn’t know if she’s ready. She doesn’t know what she hopes to find. All she knows is that she has come this far and she can either keep going, or she can fall back on what’s safe, on herself, alone once more. She can go on as she has, hiding from everything she knows but surviving, or she can see what other roads there are to take and who she can take them with.

( _does she choose with her head or her heart? is there a difference?_ )

It takes courage to face the unknown. It takes courage to move ahead when you don’t know what’s there or if you can face it.

Clarke likes to think that she can be brave.

_**End** _


End file.
